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Lesbian romance Carol is set in the early 1950s, but Todd Haynes’ sumptuous drama clearly speaks to current times, where homosexual rights are still fought for daily.

Generating deserved Oscar buzz, and also one of the best films of 2015, it stars Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara as fugitive lovers in the repressive America of the time. Screenwriter Phyllis Nagy adapts Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 cult novel The Price of Salt, said to have inspired Nabokov’s Lolita. Carol was nominated for five Golden Globes Thursday, including Best Picture, Drama and acting nods for both actresses.

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Everything clicks into place for this gorgeous achievement, which won Mara the Best Actress prize at Cannes 2015. Cinematographer Ed Lachman shot on Super 16 mm film to achieve era-specific muted colours and softer textures. Precise production design and a palette steeped in shades of green and red (appropriate to the Yuletide setting) make watching it seem like stepping inside an Edward Hopper painting.

Blanchett and Mara dress and act like opposing figures from movie lore: Blanchett looks to be a femme-fatale type from film noir; Mara strongly resembles Audrey Hepburn at her most fragile.

Yet they make for a love-at-first-sight match so intense that when each of them says at different points “I’m starving,” you know they’re not really talking about food.

When clothes are finally doffed in one censor-daring sex scene, the screen seems as if it is about to melt. But it’s what they do with their eyes that really heats things up. Desire is the hottest furnace.

Blanchett’s Carol Aird is a middle-aged, affluent and forthright New Jersey housewife and mother who falls for Mara’s Therese Belivet, a timid 20-year-old salesclerk and aspiring photographer. They meet while Carol is Christmas shopping at a Manhattan store, searching for a Betsy Wetsy doll for her daughter.

Therese also feels the yearning sensation, her eyes locking with Carol’s across the crowded toy department. The suddenness of the attraction surprises both women — especially Therese, of whom Carol comments it’s as if she has just “sprung out of space.”

Both of them have bothersome men in their lives. Carol is divorcing her angry husband (Kyle Chandler), who knows about an earlier woman in her life (Sarah Paulson) and suspects his wife’s new female friend.

Therese has a smitten boyfriend (Jake Lacy) who wants her to marry him, but as she tells Carol, “I barely know what to order for lunch.”

An impetuous decision to take a road trip west will have fateful and far-reaching consequences for both women.

That Carol and Therese would enter into a relationship, tentatively at first and then passionately, may not seem so dramatic a development in 2015. But consider the punitive early 1950s America where Carol and Therese live: homosexuality is considered a crime and a legally invoked “morality clause” could deny Carol access to her daughter.

Haynes reminds us how bad things used to be. He also invites us to remember how beautiful mad love can be and to swoon along with it.

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